Happy Independence Day!

For those of you living in the USA,  Happy Independence Day! Things are rather subdued at our house and around the country due to the pandemic, although some overzealous neighbors have been shooting off fireworks for a couple nights now. i’m pretty sure it will continue tonight as well. I’ve never understood, even as a kid, what the attraction is to lighting things on fire and blowing things up. Fireworks scare the hell out of me, and I know that at least 90% of cats and dogs agree. (Alfalfa is among the 10% of cats who enjoy fireworks, though. He sits in the window and watches as long as there are no thunderous bangs). I do enjoy a nice fireworks show put on by professionals at a city event or a ballgame, but I’ve seen too many fires (houses, trash cans, hills, etc) from neighborhood fireworks to think they are anything but pure lunacy (my blog, my opinion). Perhaps someday we’ll convert to more peaceful patriotic celebrations and give up the “bombs bursting in air”. 

For the month of July, we are focusing on dark blue for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. I was hoping for yellow, since I’m working on a mostly-yellow quilt anyway, but oh well. Yellow’s time will come.  I did get some blue scraps sewn this week, namely my selvage half hexies. Eighteen of them.

And then I finished off my dark blue selvages by stitching them together into columns for a future coin quilt. I’ve got quite a collection of these going now...

My One Monthly Goal (OMG) for June was to finish my pineapple quilt. For the first time in eighteen months, I did not make my goal. Progress was made, however, and I’m going to call it as my OMG for July. A totally finished pineapple quilt before month-end. It will get done! Here are 9 of the 10 blocks I’ve sewn so far. I’ll need a total of 24. I’m linking up to the OMG goal-setting post for July at Elm Street Quilts. 

I’m aiming to sew 2 pineapples per day. If I can stick to that, then I’ll be ready to begin assembling the quilt top by this time next week. other than sewing blue blocks for the RSC, I shouldn’t have too many distractions. Except those zipper blocks that Sally got me hooked on. I made another 18 of them this week. They are soooo much fun to sew. Quick and easy. Like Sally mentioned, it takes longer to select and cut out the fabrics than it does to sew them up.

Our vegetable garden seems to be well established now and growing nicely. We had another spate of cool weather earlier in the week and I took advantage of a cool, cloudy morning to go out and snap some pictures. 

Below is the carrot bed with a decorative metal carrot stake for size reference. Later in the summer, that stake will barely be visible. Beyond the carrot bed to the right is the spaghetti squash bed. You can also see the back wall and the pollinator habitat in the background. Oops - and an old seat that we sometimes sit on with some pumpkins growing beyond the carrot bed.

We planted one crookneck squash plant this year, and it’s already going gangbusters. You can see the blossoms giving ‘way to the squash.

This is the onion bed with the tip of my shoe for reference.  

Next up are the beans. To their left you can see an Armenian cucumber struggling with its huge cage and beyond that a tomato. Way in the back is the bed with the peas.

Next up is the bed of spinach (left), which we’re already harvesting and giving away and the lettuce (right).

This is a better view of the peas. Bruce went a little crazy with the twine, but he’s like that sometimes. The rhubarb on the left is about done for the year. I’ve frozen a lot of wonderful strawberry-rhubarb compote this year to enjoy during the winter.

That about wraps it up for this week. I’ll be linking up to Scrappy Saturday this morning and sewing away the afternoon today. We have no plans for the day, and for this year that’s just fine by us!